Innovation & Startups

Related Tags

The next time you hear the words "this conversation is being recorded for quality control purposes," think of Pittsburgh-based Silicon Vox.

Speech recognition technology is a $10 billion market, so the system that can translate human speech into text most efficiently and quickly will ultimately win a large piece of that pie. Silicon Vox is in the race and believes it's ahead of the competition.

A Carnegie Mellon spinout, the company, in semi-stealth mode, has raised $1.3 million to date, is seeking another $400,000 in seed funding and anticipates a $5 million Series A round in late 2010.

What makes Silicon Vox unique is a hardware platform that compliments the software, enabling the system to run 20 times faster than systems currently on the market, and for half the price. Its slim suitcase-size also consumes far less space.

"Nobody currently in the market is selling anything that could compete reputably with what we have," says Anthony Gadient, CEO. "There are other researchers looking at hardware implementation at UC Berkley and in South Korea, but we hope to be the first on the market."

The product, still in development , hopes to be ready by July 2010. Silicon Vox believes the company will be profitable by early 2011 with projected revenues of $2 million in the first year. The company currently employs 11 and plans to double to 21 employees within the year.

Initial users of the Silicon Vox system will come from the telecom, financial and national security areas where conversations are mined for business intelligence: to understand which sales promotions are most effective, to determine if frauds are being perpetrated and to understand the problems encountered by customers and what the competition is doing.